The Rivalry: Bill Russell, Wilt Chamberlain, and the Golden Age of Basketball

by John Taylor

  But the World Series that fall was between the New York Yankees and the San Francisco Giants. The games had been postponed because of rain, which extended the series until it overlapped with the NBA’s exhibition season, and as the Warriors prepared for their debut the San Francisco sports pages were devoted not to Wilt Chamberlain but to Willie Mays and Juan Marichal. To make matters worse, on the night of the Warriors’ first game, the Gene Fullmer–Dick Tiger middleweight championship fight was being held in Candlestick Park, and only some 5,000 people came out to watch San Francisco’s new basketball team.

  The Warriors started the season strongly, routing Detroit 140–113 in their maiden appearance in the Cow Palace. They remained in first place for almost two weeks, until the Lakers trounced them 127–115 in a game in which Chamberlain scored seventy-two points—a number that, one year ago, would have represented a record for a single game total. From then on, the Warriors steadily declined, losing eleven games in a row in one stretch, until they wound up in last place. And the team’s investors had miscalculated San Francisco’s interest in basketball. An average of 4,000 fans were showing up at each game, meaning the stands were more than two-thirds empty, and a third of those tickets sold were special one-dollar admissions. What the local memories of Bill Russell’s glory years at USF really translated into was not enthusiasm for Wilt Chamberlain and the Warriors but nostalgia for Bill Russell. The high point in attendance for the Warriors came when the Celtics first played in San Francisco, and many of the fans cheered for the Boston team.

  One reason for the Warriors’ poor performance was turnover on the roster. Paul Arizin had retired, Tom Meschery broke his wrist in the season opener, and Tom Gola decided he disliked San Francisco and asked to be traded to an East Coast team. Of the regular starters who had almost beaten the Celtics the previous year, only Al Attles, Guy Rogers, and Chamberlain were still with the team. The club had seven new members. But the Warriors also suffered from weak coaching. Bob Feerick, the coach Eddie Gottlieb had hired, had been the highly regarded and successful coach at the University of Santa Clara. But Feerick lacked the shrewdness and force of personality needed to run an NBA club, and by the middle of the season, Gottlieb was regretting his choice.

  Staying at the Mark Hopkins Hotel, Gottlieb was in touch with his associate Mike Ianarella, who’d sold tickets for the Warriors in Philadelphia and who sent Gottlieb newspaper clips so he could monitor the progress of the Phillies and the Eagles. Gottlieb complained in one of his regular letters to Ianarella that Feerick did not “know the ‘score.’ ” The coach did not discipline the players and seemed to have no idea what it took to run a professional basketball team. He was “just a nice guy and they always finish last,” Gottlieb wrote. “His ideas on the game are ‘ass’ backwards.” Gottlieb missed Frank McGuire. The Warriors’ erstwhile coach had contacted Gottlieb to get his help landing the coaching job with the Nationals—a job that ended up going to Nats player Dolph Schayes—and Gottlieb grumpily wondered why, if McGuire still wanted to be a pro coach, he hadn’t stayed with the Warriors, where he could have prevented the problems the team was now having with Feerick. “Frank McGuire must have taken the signing of Schayes badly, as he still felt he might get that job,” Gottlieb mused in another letter to Ianarella. “Well, that’s the way things go. He passed up the best job when it was offered.”

  AS A WAY of paying tribute to Lakers owner Bob Short and the success of the Lakers’ move to the West Coast, the NBA decided to hold the 1963 all-star game in Los Angeles. The day of the game, Short hosted a lunch at the Coconut Grove in the Ambassador Hotel, and some 1,000 people paid fifteen dollars a ticket to sit in the same room with the best players in the league. To commemorate the event, Short had a program printed with a self-congratulatory cover depicting a globe rendered as a basketball and over it the line “Basketball Capital of the World.” Chick Hearn, who called the Lakers games, was the emcee, cracking jokes and bantering as he invited players and coaches to the podium to say a few words. The tone was light, all pleasantries and encomiums, and when it was Fred Schaus’s turn to take the podium, the Lakers coach spoke in breezy but gracious generalities about the honor of coaching the Western Division all-stars and the excitement he felt about the upcoming game. Red Auerbach, who was coaching the Eastern all-stars, followed Schaus to the podium.

  After thirteen years as coach of the Celtics, Auerbach’s sideline theatrics had long ago turned him into a coach the fans of other teams loved to hate. Each new episode only added to his aura of despicability. In fact, Ben Kerner, the owner of the St. Louis Hawks, believed that Auerbach was so successful at inciting fans that he was one of the few coaches in the history of any sport who actually sold tickets. Hawks fans came to the game just for the sake of jeering Boston’s coach. Auerbach himself claimed that one of the franchise owners once actually encouraged him to act up, promising to pay whatever fines he incurred. Red, give ’em a little show tonight. It’s good for the gate.

  Over the years, Auerbach had been pelted with rotten tomatoes, spitballs, paper hatchets, snowballs, beer cans, rolled-up programs, purses, peanuts, and lit cigars. But eggs were by far the favored projectile of the era’s NBA fans. St. Louis fans held contests during which people in different parts of the arena took turns trying to hit him with eggs. During the 1957 championship series against the St. Louis Hawks, one egg struck Auerbach squarely in the head and splattered on Tommy Heinsohn, who said, “Red, I’m not standing near you anymore.” But Auerbach thrived on such confrontation. The boos of the opposing fans were a bracing stimulant. Appreciation discombobulated him. Appearing on The Regis Philbin Show, he appeared taken aback when the studio audience started clapping. “How come the people applauded?” he asked. “It makes me feel uneasy.”

  As time passed, Auerbach came to take such pleasure in defying conventions, thwarting rules, and generally sticking it to whoever crossed him that doing so became second nature. And on the day of the all-star lunch, he was feeling particularly irritated. He disliked playing in the Lakers’ fancy new arena, which he considered antiseptic and cold. One of the Lakers fans, a season-ticket holder, had a seat right behind the visitors’ bench and always brought a bullhorn, which he used to rail at Auerbach. Hiya, Red, you’re nothing but a bum! The fan was entitled to express his views, but Auerbach felt that using a bullhorn was going too far. When he complained to the general manager, however, nothing was done, and that had made him annoyed with the entire club.

  On this day, Auerbach was also furious with the Lakers coach, Fred Schaus, and with the local reporters, who in Auerbach’s view carried Schaus’s water for him. Auerbach had an abiding dislike for the Los Angeles sportswriters, particularly Sid Ziff of the Los Angeles Times and Ziff’s fellow torpedo man, Jim Murray. Both Timesmen had argued that Auerbach was overrated and that it was Bill Russell who deserved all the credit for the Celtics’ success. They had also attacked him as unsportsmanlike. “He could sit there like a mummy and his team would do just as well,” Ziff once declared. Murray on one occasion compared him to “a bleeding shark,” and on another he had said, “A top sergeant with corns has a better outlook on life.” Now, on the very day of the all-star luncheon, a column appeared that Ziff had written calling Auerbach “a ham actor” and suggesting he was a coward. “He’ll deliberately try to bait the crowd,” Ziff said in that morning’s paper. “Then he’ll scream for police protection when the fans start throwing things at him.” Ziff also quoted Fred Schaus complaining at length about Auerbach’s courtside behavior and saying, “I don’t think he’ll ever win a sportsmanship award but he’s won a lot of championships.”

  While Auerbach was all too happy to criticize officials in the press, he tried to avoid attacking his fellow coaches, and he felt none of them had ever taken as cheap and low a shot as Schaus had just done in the Los Angeles Times. It stung, too. After all, Auerbach felt that his approach to his job was no different from that of any coach or athlete in any sport where winners were paid mor
e than losers. They all played every angle they could find and bent or interpreted the rules to their advantage. And so, as he approached the podium during the all-star lunch, Auerbach was angry at the city of Los Angeles, at its fans and its sportswriters and at the management and, most especially, at the coach of its NBA franchise, and he had made up his mind to share his feelings.

  “I suppose you people expect me to make some more nice chitchat like Schaus,” he told the crowd. Auerbach had decided he was not going to single out Schaus for attack, but he did express his scorn for everyone associated with the Lakers, and he ridiculed the team’s record. “You’re a bunch of bushers,” he said. “That goes for the club, the fans, and all the writers.” He held up his copy of the program, with its cover line “Basketball Capital of the World.” “I come here today, and I see this—it’s ridiculous!” he shouted. “What do you people think this is? Win a couple of championships first, then talk about being the basketball capital of the world. Right now, the basketball capital is Boston. And it’s gonna stay in Boston for a long time!”

  THE WESTERN DIVISION had won the all-star game the two previous years and—with a lineup that now featured Wilt Chamberlain, Elgin Baylor, and Jerry West—it was favored to win again. But Auerbach had certainly succeeded in baiting Fred Schaus that afternoon at the lunch, and that may have contributed to the fact that Schaus’s West Coast all-stars lost to Auerbach’s East Coast team. With Russell controlling the rebounds, the East took the lead in the first quarter and never relinquished it. Russell was helped considerably by Bob Cousy. While Cousy scored only eight points, he and his backcourt partner, Oscar Robertson, had set the pace of the game from the outset. “Cousy and Big O passed the West dizzy,” was how one sportswriter put it.

  Cousy was thirty-four by then and had played professional basketball for thirteen years. He felt that physically he was capable of a couple more years in the NBA. His legs were holding out. But the game was no longer the joy it had once been. The travel, particularly because the schedule now included regular flights all the way out to California, was exhausting. It was hard to work up the motivation needed to play eighty games at the level the sport required. And for more than a year now, he’d felt that the pressure of competition had worn him down.

  The Cooz, as he was known, loved pressure, he had always felt he needed it, that without it he became edgy and irritable and distracted. Before games he would sit by himself in his hotel room visualizing his opponent as a hated antagonist who had to be treated with no mercy. He played at such a level of intensity that in contrast to many players, who found themselves keyed up after games, he was so drained he had to fight to avoid passing out altogether. But the pressure he had thrived on had exacted a price. He suffered from nightmares and sleepwalking and had a tic in his right eye and a constantly twitching nerve under his left arm. William Flynn, the director of athletics at Boston College, had offered him the job of basketball coach, and he had decided to take it.

  Cousy, who was also known as “Mr. Basketball,” was the most popular Celtic among Boston fans and one of the most popular players in the league. He had published his autobiography, Basketball Is My Life, at the age of twenty-nine, and it had gone through three printings. He was the personification of the underdog, the one player every tough little Boston Southie wanted to become, the small white fellow with the dazzling moves who could run rings around all the bigger lumbering players. Arenas around the league held Bob Cousy days to honor him, and on March 17, 1963—St. Patrick’s Day—a capacity crowd filled the Boston Garden for a formal farewell ceremony.

  Cliff Sundberg, writing the next day in the Herald, said, “Not since that memorable day when Babe Ruth limped to the microphone in Yankee Stadium on Lou Gehrig Day to say his farewell have we been so emotionally spent.” President John Kennedy sent a telegram praising Cousy’s “rare skill and competitive daring.” Walter Brown paid tribute to Cousy’s loyalty and character. “I’m the guy who didn’t want Bob Cousy in the first place,” he told the crowd. “What a genius!” Auerbach declared Cousy was the quintessence of the sport. When Cousy himself walked up to the microphone, the applause was thunderous, and when it subsided he tried to talk but became so choked up he could say nothing. The cheering continued and now Cousy’s eyes welled up, and his twelve-year-old daughter, Marie Colette, crossed the floor to pass him a handkerchief. As Cousy dabbed at his eyes, the noise abated. For a moment, the huge, damp, echoing, malodorous arena was silent, and then a single voice, high up in the balcony, rang out:

  “We love ya, Cooz!”

  It was Joseph Dillon, a thirty-two-year-old city worker, and that did it. Everyone in the Garden surged to their feet, roaring and stamping, the applause ferocious, and Cousy was now so overwhelmed he started sobbing outright, and the players and the people in the stands were sobbing as well, a flood of unabashed Irish sentimentality for the little guy, for one of their own, for the way things used to be, for the farewell we must one day always bid our heroes.

  “We love ya, Cooz!”

  “We love ya!”

  BUT COUSY was playing out the season, which the Celtics finished in first place in the Eastern Division. They felt indomitable. Although Chamberlain led the league in scoring and rebounding, the Warriors had finished the season in second-to-last place in the West. In the playoffs, the Celtics faced the Cincinnati Royals, who, with Oscar Robertson, proved tougher than expected, and overconfidence almost undid Boston. “The long reign of the Boston Celtics as NBA champions may be ending,” ran the AP lead after Cincinnati took a 2–1 lead in the series. But while the series came down to seven games, in the end the Royals could not prevail, and once again the championship would be decided between the Celtics and the Lakers.

  To the Celtics, the Lakers seemed like a relatively easy conquest in comparison to the Royals. They had a weaker team than the year before because Jerry West had pulled a hamstring while diving for the ball and had missed twenty-four games, almost the final third of the season. By the time the finals began, he had recovered enough to play, but he was not in peak form, and the Lakers lost the first two games. They took game three but not game four, and with a 3–1 lead, victory seemed certain for the Celtics. But the Lakers rallied once more, beating Boston by seven points at the Garden, and Cousy, who had fouled out for the second time in the series, blamed himself for the loss.

  Game six was in Los Angeles. The Celtics now flew in a chartered plane on shorter trips, but for longer journeys they still traveled commercially and—since Walter Brown considered first-class a luxury—squeezed into coach-class seats for the trip to the West Coast. When in Los Angeles, the team usually stayed at the Sheraton West, but the hotel had been taken over by the Milwaukee Braves, who were scheduled to play the Dodgers, and the Celtics were forced to put up at the Olympian Motel. Cousy used to room with Bill Sharman, but he liked isolation in the hours before a game, and so once Sharman retired he started taking a room of his own. The night before the game, he ran a hot bath and lay in the water visualizing the moves of Frank Selvy and Dick Barnett, the two Lakers he would most likely be guarding. The effort worked him into a hostile lather against the men, but while this state of mind would help motivate him in the game tomorrow, it did not exactly induce sleep, and when he turned off the lights he lay in bed feeling the metronomic pulsing twitch of his eye tic.

  The next morning, some of the Boston sportswriters were playing hearts out by the motel pool, but Cousy stayed in his room. The game, if the Celtics won it, would be the last of his professional career, and all he could think of was Frank Selvy. Selvy’s job was to bring the ball up the court and pass off to Baylor and West, but he had a jumper he could hit 90 percent of the time if Cousy gave him enough room. And if Selvy got the ball to Baylor often enough, Baylor could score sixty or more points. Any number of things could go wrong if Cousy didn’t keep the pressure on Selvy, which meant running. He did not want to repeat the disastrous experience of the previous game, when he’d lost his focus an
d concentration, and by the time the Celtics were scheduled to leave for the arena, he was churning with agitation and anxiety.

  At the arena, Cousy headed for the back of the dressing room. In Los Angeles, celebrities liked to drop by the dressing room, and Auerbach took them around and introduced them to the players—a ritual Cousy disliked, since all he wanted to do was focus on the game. One of the celebrities who came by that night was Johnny Mathis, who had gone to high school with Bill Russell in Oakland, and the two men sat around joking about the old days. Frank Ramsey was also sitting in the back, brooding. The locker boy brought Ramsey a hot towel, and he wrapped it around his knee. Ramsey—too short to play in the frontcourt on most teams and too slow to be a guard—was one of the talented but limited players who had flourished on the team Auerbach had designed. For eight years as the sixth man, he had been as essential to the Celtics as any starter, but he had hurt his knee so seriously the previous season that he’d had to wear an elastic brace around his entire leg, from the ankle to the hip, which chafed his skin raw. Limping when he ran, he was virtually useless to the team during last year’s playoffs, and had wanted to retire. Auerbach had talked him into returning, but his leg still bothered him, and Ramsey, who had once been one of the most gregarious and fun-loving people in the dressing room, had turned dark and withdrawn.

  Cousy changed into his uniform, which took all of five minutes, then Tommy Heinsohn joined him and Ramsey in the back. Cousy was as close to Heinsohn as he was to anyone on the team. The two lived near each other in Worcester and carpooled in to the Garden and out to the airport. While Cousy liked Heinsohn, he felt that Heinsohn’s undeniable talent was undercut by a lack of personal discipline. For example, Heinsohn smoked two packs of cigarettes a day for years, and it hurt his wind. Cousy had always been after Heinsohn to quit, and finally, toward the end of this season, he had, and was now playing better than he’d ever played. Cousy told Heinsohn and Ramsey they needed to win tonight and put away the series. Heinsohn said they couldn’t allow the series to go to a seventh game. Ramsey agreed. Anything could happen in a seventh game.